Players Unexpectedly Discover Secret Rare Cards Added to MTG Star Trek

Last updated on November 5, 2026

Risa | Illustration by Colin Searle

If you thought you had seen every Star Trek card, something might have slipped past you: A unique, unannounced variant of five cards from the set: Tribble variants! These borderless cards have unique borderless art showing characters with tribbles, and (reportedly) an extremely rare pull rate from Star Trek Play Boosters.

Tribble Variant Cards

In total, five cards have tribble variants:

• Nyota Uhura, Communications
• Scotty, Miracle Worker
• Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy
• Kirk, Commanding Officer
• Spock, Always Your Friend

That’s one mythic, two rares, and two uncommons with tribble variants total. Of course, that just leaves the question of where to open them, which is where this becomes fascinating.

Where Can You Get Star Trek Tribble Variants?

Kirk, Commanding Officer (Tribble Variant) | Illustration by Vlad Petruchik

In a shockingly fun move, Wizards of the Coast has released virtually no information regarding these tribble variants. They weren’t spoiled or previewed or leaked, and they weren’t included in the Collecting Star Trek article that (normally!) compiles all treatments/art variants and the odds of opening them. The only official acknowledgment Wizards gave was uploading all five cards to Gatherer. So, much of the information we have comes from players and collectors on Reddit, cracking packs, discovering tribble cards, and putting their minds together to understand this surprise; keep a salt shaker handy.

First up, these might be exclusive to Play Boosters. At the very least, nobody has confirmed that they’ve pulled a tribble variant from a TRK Collector Booster; everybody (I’ve seen) online who has claimed to open one did so through a Play Booster, like Powersnap95:

It seems like they always appear in foil, which makes sense for an exclusive treatment like this. Which might be very exclusive, as the popular theory seems to be that these appear less than once per box of Play Boosters. One user claimed to get all five from cracking 8 cases for their LGS, but described it as “very hard.”

Again, these are comments on the internet and not hard numbers. Another comment, by Redditor hillean, made a very interesting comparison to the tribble variants and the Alchemy cards printed into paper in Mystery Booster Commander Edition:

It’s a hefty assumption, but if we follow the logic and out MBC’s Collecting article, traditional foil Alchemy cards appear less than 1% of the time. If Wizards won’t publish hard numbers, we can do nothing more than speculate but this number feels right for a scarce surprise. I honestly love this. It would be even more fun if Wizards hadn’t thrown these cards on Gatherer, and we just got them. I hope to see more rare, surprise variants in the future.